Folkwang Photo Talk with Carolin Görgen
27.1.2026
At Folkwang, we are looking forward to welcoming Carolin Görgen for this winter term’s third Folkwang Photo Talk:
Black Gold: Photography, Extraction, and the Promise of the Petroleumscape
At a moment when eco-critical scholarship interrogates how visual regimes sustain extractive economies, this talk examines the entanglements of photography and petroleum in early twentieth-century Southern California. As Los Angeles County became the center of U.S. oil production in the 1920s and 1930s, photographers such as Shigemi Uyeda and Florence Kemmler redirected their lenses from iconic western landscapes toward the emergent »petroleumscape« (Hein) of derricks, tanks, and trenches. Their images normalized oil’s presence in the built environment and turned petroleum into a readily accessible resource, both physically and visually. Situating oil photography within the fraught environmental histories of the American West, this talk integrates an expanded conception of extraction that encompasses the physical operations of drilling, the aesthetic practices that crystallized around petroleum, as well as their material repercussions.
In Southern California—epicenter of both automobility and motion-picture production—photography functioned as an oil-derived medium, reliant on petrochemical film stocks and equipment. The resulting images did more than record industrial expansion: they forged an »aesthetics of petroleum« (LeMenager) that celebrated infrastructural growth, obscured labor, and rendered fossil-fuel development seemingly organic to the landscape, even as it reshaped minority and working-class neighborhoods. The afterlives of this extractive imaginary continue to structure regional memory. Now held in institutions funded by oil wealth, these photographs make clear how fossil-fuel capital is interwoven with artistic practice. By tracing these entanglements, the talk positions oil photographs as a critical yet underexamined agent in the long extractive histories of the American West.
Carolin Görgen is Associate Professor of American Studies at Sorbonne Université and a 2025 Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles. A historian of photography and the American West, she is the author of The California Camera Club: Collective Visions in the Making of the American West (University of Oklahoma Press, 2025). Her research focuses on historical photo networks in the western United States and their environmental afterlives. Görgen’s research has been supported, among others, by the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Huntington Library, and the Thomas Mann House. In France, she serves on the editorial board of the journal Photographica.
Carolin Görgen’s talk will open the 21st research colloquium for the theory and history of photography, taking place at Folkwang University of the Arts in January and July of each year.
The talk will take place on January 27, 2026 at 6 pm at Folkwang’s Quartier Nord and is open to the public. Everybody inside and outside the university is cordially invited to partipate!